My Darling Clementine (1946)

Ford's mastery of composition: he uses horizontal, diagonal, and vertical lines to restrict the space for the characters and enhances the tension.

My Darling Clementine (1946), the first Western John Ford made after WWII, portrays the impact of the war on him. He signed up as a volunteer with the US Navy after the Pearl Harbor attack in December 1941 and continued to serve until the war's end.

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Clementine's script was written based on the historical records of the period when Wyatt Earp (Henry Fonda) was the marshal of Tombstone and his brothers were his deputies. The famous confrontation of the Earps and Clantons took place in the O.K. Corral, which was a part of the town.

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There are five renditions of Wyatt Earp's story, all with varying degrees of historical accuracy. Reflecting the darkening of Ford's vision evident in his revisionist westerns, Cheyenne Autumn (1964) includes a brief scene where the once-heroic marshal has been reduced to a mere gambler. He uses the bar counter as an operating table to remove a bullet from the leg of someone he shot. While Doc Holiday is present, Earp does the surgery. The piece is a comic rendition of the operation scene in Clementine.

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Several critics have argued over Ford's position on one of the Western genre's essential themes: wilderness vs. civilization. While his early Westerns showed a penchant for the wilderness, as in Stagecoach, in the postwar period, particularly in the movies he made about the US Cavalry, he shifted his position by depicting the Cavalry as a force protecting civilization. During his revisionist period, his enthusiasm for civilization diminishes somewhat.

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However, he continues to demonstrate how civilization replaces the wilderness, most evident in his last Western, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), where he gives up the majestic landscapes of Monument Valley for the black-and-white presentation of the urban environment, predominantly photographed at night. During the day, we have the ugly black smoke of the locomotive polluting the virgin land of the West.

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The confrontation between the dependable Earps and the violent, nomadic Clantons creates the tension through which Ford demonstrates the central themes of his postwar Westerns. By 1946, when he made Clementine, the sympathy he had shown for primitive natural forces, as in Stagecoach with Ringo (John Wayne), was gone. Instead of depicting the promising aspect of such forces, Ford begins to see the dark side of the characters he had celebrated before the war.

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The darkness of Ford's vision in the postwar period is portrayed as Dallas, the prostitute with a heart of gold, turns to Chihuahua, who wears the pendant James purchased for his fiancée.

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Dallas (Claire Trevor), the prostitute with a heart of gold in Clementine, turns to Chihuahua (Linda Darnell), who, despite her love for Doc Holliday (Victor Mature), spends an evening with the ruthless Billy Clanton (John Ireland) after she has been ignored.  Ford later draws another painful comparison between the two women. James had purchased the pendant for his fiancée, but it was discovered on Chihuahua's neck; the contrast reflects the bleak impact of WWII on his views.